What they say...

I was asked recently what the two parties' arguments on global warming are. Essentially, the Bush administration's "position" can only be called "opposed." They don't have arguments against. For the longest time, the white house simply ignored the issue... quite literally they just said "Nope, this is not happening. Finally, they've admitted that global warming is, in fact, happening but that the causes can't be known. In other words, they've adopted the same defense as cigarette makers: you can't prove it was us. Their position has been irrational, unreal, and absolutely unsupportable, though, and so they have taken to lying to the American people as their only alternative. They put a former oil lobbiest with no scientific training or background in charge of editing the scientific reports of the government's study on global warming.

So in 2001, 180 countries came together in Kyoto, Japan for the writing of what came to be known as the Kyoto Accord. This agreement calls for the "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." Basically, it says we have to stop polluting because our actions are affecting our climate. 156 out of 191 other countries in the world representing over 2/3 of the world's population have ratified the treaty and it came into effect in February 2005 with the cooperation of the Russian government. In 2001, the United States quite literally left the negoting table mid-conference, turning its back on the global effort to lessen the damage we do because it was too expensive. Last month, the world again came together, this time in Montreal, to discuss the next step after Kyoto expires in 2012. Again, the US negotiator to the conference left a day or so into the conference, this time in a public huff. The US government insists that reducing greenhouse gasses is too expensive to fix and insists further that it is or may not be a problem in the first place.

Two-thirds of the world's population is discussing this. Yes, the representative governments of roughly two-thirds of the world's population... that's about 4 billion people for the folks keeping score at home... 4,000,000,000 people are asking the United States to please stop destroying the planet. We have less than 5% of the world's population and create roughly 33% of the world's pollution and consume 33% of the world's resources. But our government insists on taking a 10 year-old approach to the issue, literally ignoring citizens's pleas for change, scientists' warnings of bad things that will come of our current coarse, and, of course, the 4 billion people who are asking us to stop tearing the place up.

Here's a good list, put together by the Sierra Club, of the Bush regime's top ten environmental offenses.

Cheers.